Designing Your Own Emergency Kit

You never know where you might be when disaster strikes. You could be visiting a mall 80 miles from your home, making a special purchase, when the ground is suddenly wrenched by the powerful spasm of an earthquake and buildings come crashing down around you.

You could be on a business trip and find yourself unable to change your airline tickets as a dangerous hurricane bears down on the city you’re in. You could even be overseas sightseeing, enrolled in a cheap local university, or spending time with your foreign fiance, and find the place you’re in being evacuated ahead of a massive forest fire.
The fact that we can’t just huddle fearfully at home for our whole lives is the reason why emergency kits are needed. You may have extensive, elaborate survival preparations at home – including a generator, food and water supplies, weapons and ammunition, and all the other “fixings” – but you cannot remain within arm’s reach of it at all times. Emergencies are not always polite enough to wait until you are close to your prepared supplies before striking, however.

To help you counter this risk, you can make an emergency kit – a small, portable kit with a few well chosen items of equipment. This kit is designed to be a bare bones help in time of peril – it must remain small enough to be easily portable, fitting entirely into a backpack or a large purse. The kit is centered around tools and items that will aid you in surviving in the short run if you are caught in a disaster far from other resources.

Each member of your family should have an emergency kit that they carry with them whenever they leave the house. It is absolutely imperative that the kit be small enough and light enough to be carried in a backpack or purse. One of its main purposes is to extract you from buildings if the automated systems shut down or jam – as can happen very easily when the power is cut off, by earthquake, weather, fire, terrorist action, and so on.

Therefore, the emergency kit is absolutely useless to you if it is too big to bring along with you wherever you go – because it is inside buildings that you are going to need it, not, generally speaking, in your car. Of course, regarding small children, the accompanying adult can just bring an extra smoke hood for them, since they are unable to use most of the tools in an emergency kit emergency kit and probably wouldn’t understand how to in any case.